


can you feel my past, can you find my future?

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ADWD spoilers, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 19:20:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s as wild as the wood around them when Ghost finds her, sniffing her out as if she’s a rabbit and he’s on the hunt. Hair a tangled nest, eyes darting and fingers jittery, she cringes away from the men advancing on her even more than she does from the beast that sniffs the air and stands before her, stiff-legged and suspicious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	can you feel my past, can you find my future?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hesperia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hesperia/gifts).



> From the kinkmeme prompt: Post ADWD, Jon travels South with Stannis to meet the Lannisters et al, and finds Jeyne along the way, starving and perhaps mad, Stannis tells him to leave her, but Jon cannot leave her on the road. Eventually they realize who they are to each other.
> 
> _note: this involves a character with a tenuous grip on reality and sex, so consider this a trigger warning if that will bother you._

She’s as wild as the wood around them when Ghost finds her, sniffing her out as if she’s a rabbit and he’s on the hunt. Hair a tangled nest, eyes darting and fingers jittery, she cringes away from the men advancing on her even more than she does from the beast that sniffs the air and stands before her, stiff-legged and suspicious.

“Leave off,” Jon says in a low voice. He’d meant the words for Ghost alone, but Stannis’s men obey as if the command was for them, backing through the brush towards the abandoned village where they’d made their camp. Jon thinks perhaps she’s been living there, startled from the burned out buildings like a thrush at the arrival of Stannis’s van on its way south to King’s Landing. Only Stannis remains now, looking at the girl with vague, dispassionate disapproval.

“We’ve no room for half-mad wastrels,” he says. He doesn’t wait for Jon’s response before returning to camp. Whether that’s because he expects Jon will leave her here or knows he won’t, Jon isn’t sure. He could no sooner leave her here than he could change the color of his hair.

He’d expected it would take the better part of the night to coax her into trusting him, but not long after Stannis has gone, she steps towards Jon cautiously, her eyes fixed firmly at his feet.

“Boy,” she says, flicking her glance up at him for less than a heartbeat. “A boy and his beast.” Ghost makes a huffing sound, as if knowing she speaks of him, and Jon laughs.

“Yes,” he answers, thinking on how true her words are, no matter that he’d thought the boy in him was dead.

She reaches towards his face with a tentative hand then, unthinkingly, before remembering herself and pulling back. Her eyes meet his and there’s a spark in the anxious haze, a glimmer of some life gone past.

“I remember you,” she whispers. Jon doesn’t answer; he merely takes her hand and leads her back to camp.

***

She’ll let no others near her, but Jon doesn’t mind. She’s no trouble, and as days pass and they press farther south, he grows used to her quiet company, even fond of it in a way. He’s been among men for so long, Stannis’s coarse men and the men of the Night’s Watch who were even coarser. She’s no cleaner than they, but there is an appealing softness in her manner, a gentility that makes Jon wonder if she was nobly born. She reminds him of Sansa somehow, girlish and sweet even beneath her grime and tangles, behind the half-wild glint that shows in her eyes. He’d not realized he missed such a part of his former life.

She speaks very little, keeping quiet and close to herself each day and retreating to his tent as soon as it’s set up each evening. The first night, he’d expected supper to be waiting for the both of them, but he found only crumbs remaining, the girl curled into a corner as if she could make herself invisible, out of guilt or a desire to avoid his censure. He only asks for extra the next night, knowing that food is spare enough that he can only do so much for her.

“You need a name,” Jon decides one evening, when she’s been with him long enough to have some measure of comfort. She’d smiled at him that night when he entered his tent, shyly sitting to supper with him, and for a moment it had seemed to Jon as if he returned to his wife.

“A name,” she echoes softly. She’s not truly mad, he’s found, but rather prone to fits of unreality, drifting in and out of a wooly-headed haze. Some days she seems sharp as a newly-honed blade. Others she seems fretful and far-away, frequently touching his arm and speaking of an arrow. “I remember the arrow,” she’d said the first time, knitting her brow in gentle confusion. His heart had dropped in his chest, his blood running chill. How could she know of Ygritte?, he’d thought, of the arrow in his leg, or worse, the arrow in Ygritte’s chest that in his worst dreams came from his own bow. Her eyes were glassy when she looked at him, the tangled mat of her hair making her seem wild and other-worldly, like a witch from some far off place who looked at a man and saw his past. But then she’d gripped his arm more firmly, saying, “The Maester removed the arrow. You’ve a scar, such a terrible scar.” Each time she’d mentioned it, he’d gently told her there was no arrow. And each time, her face had fallen and she’d closed in on herself, curling on the furs in a sleep so deep that he’d not been able to rouse her until Stannis gave the order to march the next morrow.

She seems a bit other-worldly now as well, cocking her head at him like a bird. “What name would you give me?” There’s something playful in the question.

“I’ve no gift for names,” Jon laughs. “Ghost practically named himself. Hmm, perhaps you’re a…Danna?” She smiles, shaking her head. “Alys.” Again she shakes her head. “Walburga,” he suggests, and she laughs out loud, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

“You’ll have to keep guessing until you get it right,” she says, mischief in her voice and in her eyes, and Jon smiles in response.

***

After a handful of days, she permits him to do something about her hair. It’s a task best suited for a lady’s maid – or at least someone with infinite patience – but she’ll still allow none but Jon near, so it falls to him to attack the tangles and snarls, laboriously working through the mat of it until he can run the comb somewhat easily. He’s sure it must hurt her at times, but she says nothing. He remembers Arya’s complaints about having her hair yanked and pulled when Lady Stark got it in her head to make her look a lady, and thinks again that perhaps the girl is nobly born, used to such grooming habits as this.

“Beth,” he suggests. He’s offered probably a hundred names so far, and not been right yet, or at least if he’d been right she’d not admitted to it. The shake of her head sends rough hair sliding over his knuckles, her back twisting against his shins.

“Pretty,” she says. “But no.”

As they move farther south, she becomes agitated, anxious, fluttering about with nervous energy and seeming as if she might bolt at the slightest provocation. Jon begins to wonder if she’ll be there in the evening on his return, or if she’ll flee and return to the wilderness in which he found her. But each night she’s there. He’s gladder than he would have expected at that.

***

She wakes him one night in the dead hours, when even Ghost sleeps deeply and the moon is bright enough to line the bottom of the tent with white light. He starts and then freezes at the feel of her lips on his. She doesn’t move to deepen the kiss, but nor does she move away. He opens his lips to feel the soft issue of her breath, waiting for her to speak or to move, waiting.

“My name is Jeyne,” she whispers, the movement of her lips a ticklish brush against his. 

She curls against his side them, a warm weight that immediately floods him with sadness and remembrance and a contentment so deep that he slides almost instantly back into sleep. It’s been so long since a woman shared his furs, even in such a chaste manner. It’s such a simple sort of human contact that it feels almost silly to have missed it as much as he did.

***

“Why do you stay with me?” he wants to ask, day after day, but he does not wish to hear the answer.

Still they press further south. Hills pull and flatten alongside them, stretching into rolling land covered with grasses that sing and sway in the wind. Even the light changes, growing warm and sweet, softer somehow than the harsh light of the north that Jon’s known for so many years now. Jeyne rides at his side, turning her face into the sun, scenting at the air the way Ghost does, as if she could learn the land’s secrets by nothing more than smell. She makes him smile. She makes him long for something he won’t name.

***

“Are you going to keep her forever as if a pet?” Stannis asks him impatiently one day, when she’s grown agitated and run off, climbing a tree and wedging herself in a vee of branches, resisting all attempts to be coaxed down. “We march to claim a throne, not serve as Septas to a child with no sense.”

“She’s not a child,” Jon snaps. It’s rare he speaks to Stannis in such a tone. He supposes there’s little part of him left to care.

There’s a circlet of burrs sitting atop her head when she finally comes down, dipping down over her brow like a woman’s headpiece. The burrs have scratched at her skin, drawing blood that shows bright red at her hairline. But when Jon reaches to take it from her, she struggles, clutching it to her head even more fiercely and kicking out at him with her feet.

She sobs, so heavily that he can barely understand her words. “It was my crown,” she cries. “You gave it to me and she took it.” Then her eyes clear, she looks at him with chilling focus. “No, not you. Robb. My Robb gave it to me and she took it away. They took him away.” Ice forms and cracks in Jon’s veins. Suddenly everything slots together, clicking like the tumbler on a lock. She looks at him, her eyes piercingly clear, her face the history of a broken heart

“Jeyne.” It’s almost as if it’s a different name now, the name of a different person. His brother’s wife. His brother’s widow. 

The world is never what he thinks.

*** 

They’re all dead now, the Freys, or near enough. Dead by Northern hands, by the mechanisms of retribution and revenge, by the machine of war. Hedging bets was a dangerous prospect, making foe of friend and enemy alike. Stannis orders a stop for only an hour, resting on a nearby hill that looks out over the empty shell of the Twins, one tower crumbling into the river it fords, bridges open to all who would cross them. Jon wants to storm inside, sword drawn, blood up. He wants to wake their ghosts and kill them all over again.

“I thought it would help,” Jeyne says. Tears crowd the words, stopping up her throat. Her hand is small and warm in his, her cheek warm against his shoulder and her hair soft on his jaw. “But I don’t even care that they’re dead.”

That night he sharpens Longclaw to a hairsbreadth, the blade so quick that the barest touch brings crimson drops of blood welling forth from the center of his palm. For a long moment, he can only stare at the redness of it as it settles into the lines and cracks, as if to aid an old wandering woman in reading his fortunes. Before he can wipe it clean, Jeyne catches his hand and presses it to her lips, her tongue a quick salve. His heart clenches like a fist.

“You won’t leave me,” she says. Jon would ask how she sounds so certain, but he can’t deny the truth of it.

***

The night she climbs beneath his furs and presses her bare body to his, he’s less surprised than he should be. Though perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised at all. It’s wrong, or it should be. It feels right, though it’s not. Jon feels as confused as she sometimes is, wanting little more than to turn to her and lose himself in her heady warmth.

“Jeyne,” he groans, and her name is a prayer on his lips. He wonders now how he’d gone so long thinking she could be called anything else. She only answers him with another kiss.

There’s something chaste about it. Even when he chases the taste of her into her mouth, even when he allows her to press his hand to her breast and then at the juncture of her thighs, not moving his hand of his own volition but letting her hold it against herself as she rocks and circles her hips, uttering soft, mewling sounds into his mouth. There’s an innocence to it, somehow, a sweet lack of guile, even when he gives in to her silent pleas and lets her pull him atop her, her knees parting for him, her body embracing him, welcoming him, granting him sweet entrance. He tries to remember the days she spends drifting in and out of reality. He tries to forget them. He’d thought his days of guilt-ridden pleasures were over when the Night’s Watch released him from his vows. But then, few of the things life has brought are what Jon had expected.

“You feel regret,” she says afterward, once she’s tucked herself beneath his chin like she belongs there. Her voice pierces straight to the heart of him.

“Not regret,” he corrects gently, running idle fingers through the fall of her hair. “I fear I took advantage of you.”

“ _I_ took advantage of _you_ ,” she counters firmly. Jon can’t help but smile.

“Did you?”

“Yes. And I shall again.”

“You sound quite sure of that,” he says, meaning the words to sound more playful than they do, and less plaintive.

“I’ve tasted your blood,” she tells him, quite seriously. “I’ve seen your future.”

“And you’re in my future.” He ventures the words as a question, but they feel more like a promise.

“No,” she says patiently. “You’re in mine.”


End file.
